Gustave Courbet (1819-77) was a French artist whose work heralded the realist movement of the nineteenth century and his paintings have had a profound influence on other artists from around the world, including Claude Monet, James McNeill Whistler, and Paul Cézanne. This catalog is published to accompany an exhibition of the same name at the McMullen Museum, Boston College, in the autumn of 2013, which was put together in tandem with the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium. Approaching its subject from a unique perspective, Courbet: Mapping Realism looks at the artist's reception on both sides of the Atlantic, and includes paintings by Courbet himself, as well as Belgian and American realist-influenced artists. American and Belgian scholars, including Jeffery Howe, Claude Cernuschi, Dominique Marechal, and Katherine Nahum, contribute essays that explore Courbet's art in light of this expanded view of his career. Complete with color illustrations, Courbet: Mapping Realism showcases artwork from both the United States and Belgium that are rarely exhibited or published together.

This book has been considered by academicians and scholars of great significance and value to literature. This forms a part of the knowledge base for future generations. So that the book is never forgotten we have represented this book in a print format as the same form as it was originally first published. Hence any marks or annotations seen are left intentionally to preserve its true nature.

In this pioneering study, Clark looked at the inextricable links between modern art and history.

A comprehensive reinterpretation of the pioneering and media-savvy artist The modern artist strives to be independent of the public's taste—and yet depends on the public for a living. Petra Chu argues that the French Realist Gustave Courbet (1819-1877) understood this dilemma perhaps better than any painter before him. In The Most Arrogant Man in France, Chu tells the fascinating story of how, in the initial age of mass media and popular high art, this important artist managed to achieve an unprecedented measure of artistic and financial independence by promoting his work and himself through the popular press. The Courbet who emerges in Chu's account is a sophisticated artist and entrepreneur who understood that the modern artist must sell—and not only make—his art. Responding to this reality, Courbet found new ways to "package," exhibit, and publicize his work and himself. Chu shows that Courbet was one of the first artists to recognize and take advantage of the publicity potential of newspapers, using them to create acceptance of his work and to spread an image of himself as a radical outsider. Courbet introduced the independent show by displaying his art in popular venues outside the Salon, and he courted new audiences, including women. And for a time Courbet succeeded, achieving a rare freedom for a nineteenth-century French artist. If his strategy eventually backfired and he was forced into exile, his pioneering vision of the artist's career in the modern world nevertheless makes him an intriguing forerunner to all later media-savvy artists.

"'This book,' Michael Fried's work opens, 'was written not so much chapter by chapter as painting by painting over a span of roughly ten years.' Courbet's Realism is a magnificent work and its very first sentence brings us up against the qualities of mind of its author, qualities that make it as impressive as it is. It allows us to reconstruct the keen eye, the commitment to perception, the gift of rapt concentration, the conviction that great paintings are not necessarily understood easily, and the further conviction that a great painter deserves to get from us as good as he gives. By drawing on these qualities, Fried achieves something out of reach for all but a handful of his colleagues. In his writing, art history takes on some of the character of art itself. It is driven by the same stubborn resolve to open our eyes."—Richard Wollheim, San Francisco Review of Books Courbet's Realism is clearly a major contribution to the highly active field of Courbet studies. . . . But to contribute here and now is necessarily also to contribute to central debates about art history itself, and so the book is also—I hesitate to say 'more importantly,' because of the way object and method are woven together in it—a major contribution to current attempts to rethink the foundations and objects of art history. . . . It will not be an easy book to come to terms with; for all its engagement with contemporary literary theory and related developments, it is not an application of anything, and its deeply thought-through arguments will not fall easily in line with the emerging shapes of the various 'new art histories' that tap many of the same theoretical resources. At this moment, there may be nothing more valuable than such a work."—Stephen Melville, Art History